Charles Clarke claims in an interview in the New Statesman that Tony Blair “wanted me to be foreign secretary because he thought that if I had been foreign secretary and home secretary I would be a credible opponent to Gordon, as the leader of the party. And this had been his long-standing strategy, and that was what he had been intending to do, and that’s what he hoped to do.”

Funny, he is rumoured to have wanted exactly the same for David Miliband. Who to believe?